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Moving from phpBB to vbulletin Issues

Hello All - I'm considering upgrading from phpbb to vbulletin, and need some feedback. First, how difficult is converting the DB or importing it to VB?

Next, I'd like to be able to have users pay to post in certain areas (pay per post) similar to how Sitepoint has it set up. Is this a standard mod, or do I need to find a customized solution for this?

Last, I currently have one main rss feed that I get a ton of traffic from. I don't want to change and lose all of the traffic. I'm sure there is some kind of rss feed from VB - is there a way to have it be named the same as my phpbb feed? (FORUMNAME.com/rss.php)

It's pretty easy with Impex, you should check that out, it is in your members area of vBulletin.com. I believe it is a customized hack that is used here although you may be able to find something similar at vBulletin.org I think it is named the same thing by default.

Back in May I moved a phpBB based site over to vB and had no problems whatsoever.

Regarding your RSS feed, you could probably hack vB's code to make it work the way you need. Although, I would recommend that instead of modifying vB's code you modify the original rss.php file to point to vB's feed data. That way you shouldn't need to reapply the *fix* whenever vB upgrades are available.

What about SEO? What I mean is . . . I wonder how much of a traffic loss I'll see due to this switchover. I have many backlinks to the forums. This is actually my biggest fear right now. Is this a valid concern?

What would everyone recommend I do about this?
We've got over 3200 members and over 12,000 posts.

One more thing. . . is there a mod for VB similar to topics_anywhere.php? (phpbb)

What about SEO? What I mean is . . . I wonder how much of a traffic loss I'll see due to this switchover. I have many backlinks to the forums. This is actually my biggest fear right now. Is this a valid concern?

What would everyone recommend I do about this?
We've got over 3200 members and over 12,000 posts.

Chances are that the new thread locations on your site will be picked up by Google before the old IPB threads are dropped from the Google index. You could possibly end up with a bit more traffic for a while, although I don't know for certain about that as it would be duplicated content.

Just make sure that you at least have a 404 error page that will redirect all non-functioning links back to your site and not use the default 404 error that will cost you traffic.

vB's importer I believe also has a tool that can help you to setup redirection so that all old threads & posts indexed by Google and other search engines are automatically redirected to the proper place within your vB install.